Supersymmetry

CHAPTER 9

“That,” Agent Liddle said, “is the most preposterous story I’ve ever heard.”

They were still in the same conference room, an hour and a half into Sandra’s explanation. She was tired and thirsty and getting annoyed at Liddle’s unrelenting skepticism.

“Believe me or not,” Sandra said. “I don’t care. I’m trying to help you understand what you’re up against.”

“So your—what did you call it—your probability wave never resolved?” Agent Liddle said. “Which makes you some kind of clone of Alessandra?”

“I’m just as much Alessandra as she is,” Sandra said. “I remember growing up in that house. I remember when my brother, Sean, was born. I remember losing my teeth, and learning to ride a bike. I am Alessandra Kelley. The problem is, Alex is, too.”

Detective Messinger had been quiet for a long time, standing against the wall while the feds took over the investigation. Now she spoke up. “What you’re describing took place years ago. What about now?”

Liddle glared at Messinger, but didn’t say anything.

“I have no idea,” Sandra said. “I haven’t talked to Alex. My dad didn’t seem to know anything about it. I just showed up for work today.”

“What if you had to guess?” Messinger pressed.

Sandra sighed. “I suppose I would say, on the basis of the viewfeed you showed me, that Alex has been playing with the same technology that caused our family so much trouble years ago. If so, I think she’s an arrogant fool. Her demo must have given the varcolac access to our universe again. But even if that’s the case, Alex didn’t kill anyone, at least not directly. It was the varcolac that killed Secretary Falk and his bodyguards. Quite possibly, it was the varcolac that destroyed the stadium, too.”

Liddle shook his head. “The stadium was destroyed twelve hours before your sister’s demo.”

“So maybe it broke out before the demo. I don’t know what you want me to say.”

Liddle put a finger to his ear. “You’ll have to excuse me,” he said. He stepped out of the room, followed by his two silent shadows.

Messinger stepped out as well, returning moments later with a chilled bottle of water that she slid across the table to Sandra. Sandra popped the cap and drank it gratefully.

Messinger slipped into the seat across from her. “You understand how all this looks, right? Two major terrorist actions on the same day, your father and sister present at both of them, and both of them now on the run.”

Sandra didn’t try to hide her worry. “You haven’t found either of them yet?”

“Disappeared without a trace. Your father left his car behind, so he’s apparently found some other means of transportation. We’ve checked buses, trains, taxis: so far, nothing. Do you know which of his associates might be willing to lend him a car?”

“Associates?” Sandra ran her fingers through her hair. “My father has friends, not associates. Might one of them lend him a car? Sure, I don’t know. But there’s no conspiracy. He’s not a terrorist.”

“Then why is he running?”

Sandra pictured her father leaving the house suddenly without telling her mother, heading down the street on foot, and tried to imagine what he would do, how he would get transportation. It didn’t make any sense. There was no reason for him to suddenly run away without a word and without a car. An itching fire grew behind her eyes and a lump formed in her throat. She knew what this meant. There was only one way her father could have suddenly disappeared from his house without warning. His probability wave had resolved.

“What is it?” Messinger said.

“My father,” Sandra said. “He’s not on the run.”

“What do you mean?”

She swallowed hard. “I’m pretty sure he’s dead.”

Detective Messinger took Sandra for a drive in her cruiser. Liddle had been called away, probably to harass some other innocent person, and Sandra was just as glad he was gone. Messinger drove haphazardly for ten minutes, and then parked illegally in front of a Mexican restaurant.

“Like Mexican?” she asked.

Sandra suddenly realized how hungry she was. “Sure. Anything,” she said.

Inside, they settled into a corner booth and ordered a plate of quesadillas. “So now you claim your father died in the stadium disaster,” Messinger said.

Sandra nodded.

Messinger nodded back thoughtfully. “And yet, you testified earlier to having spoken to him after the explosion. That you shared Mr. Gutierrez’s data with him, and that he provided you with the key to understanding the pattern of the blast and determining the source.”

“Also true,” Sandra said.

Messinger stopped nodding and waited.

“It’s hard to explain,” Sandra said.

Messinger opened her hands wide, indicating the empty table on which their food had not yet been served. Plenty of time.

“In high school, you might have learned about something called Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle.”

“Sounds vaguely familiar,” Messinger said.

“My father always complains that they teach it wrong—that kids memorize it without a clue as to what it means. The gist is that subatomic particles—protons or electrons or photons—can’t be entirely known. If you pinpoint where they are at a given moment, then you can’t know how fast they’re going. If you determine their velocity, you can’t know where they are. And the weird thing is, it’s not just a matter of our ignorance. The proton itself isn’t in just one place. It’s smeared out across a range of possible places, with a certain probability. It’s called superposition. It really is in more than one place at one time.”

“So, your father…”

“One step at a time,” Sandra said. “The varcolac is a quantum creature. It carries with it a quantum probability wave that affects the things around it. It makes large things, like people and cars and houses, behave in the crazy way that subatomic particles can. The technology you saw my sister using is the same.”

“I didn’t see the video,” Messinger said, her tone bitter. “Need-to-know classification, according to Mr. Black Suit. I’m just running this investigation. Why would I need to know?”

The quesadillas arrived, and Sandra paused to take a bite. It was delicious, piping hot, with lots of melted cheese. She wiped her mouth before responding. “An encounter with the varcolac can put a person in a state of superposition, like a subatomic particle, so that he exists as a set of possibilities rather than a single reality. It happened to my father fifteen years ago, and it happened to me.

“When I spoke to my father this morning, he said he had left the game early, in the eighth inning. I think the varcolac must have appeared there at that time, splitting my father into two possibilities—one of which left the game early, and the other of which stayed and died.”

Liddle had seemed to find her story farfetched, but Messinger listened attentively, and Sandra found she could explain herself better. It also occurred to her that perhaps Liddle and Messinger were working together more than they appeared to be, manipulating her with a classic good-cop, bad-cop routine, but she didn’t care. She was glad to talk to a willing listener, and she didn’t have anything to hide.

“So you’re saying your father split into two versions of himself, before the explosion,” Messinger said, her tone a little skeptical, but not mocking. “The first version went home early. The second version stayed.”

“Yes.”

“So you think there are two versions of your father, one dead and one alive?”

“There were.”

“Not anymore?”

“I don’t think so.” Sandra heard her voice wavering, and willed herself not to start crying. “Usually, probability waves don’t stay unresolved for long. I think my father resolved back into only one version of himself, and the version he resolved to was the dead one.”

“And why do you think that?”

“Because my living father is gone, apparently vanished into thin air without even a word to his wife, while his dead body is still very much here.”

She sent Messinger a link to the view of her father’s body from Nathan’s viewfeed. Messinger studied it, her face grave.

“Has the body been positively identified?” she asked.

“My father’s wallet and keys were found in the pockets,” Sandra said. “I doubt DNA is back at this point, given the number of people to process.”

“Perhaps we can expedite that,” Messinger said.